After the longest wait, Halo 3 is finally here...

After that long wait Halo 3 is finally sitting inside of my Xbox 360 system. I have to be a little honest with you guys (er.. And girls)... This review is going to be a bit hard for me to do. Not because or anything negative, but because Halo is such a huge game online that I honestly doubt I will be able to cover every aspect of it’s huge multi-player glory in a small review. So I will no doubt try my best to give you all the goods of Halo 3 without boring you to hell like some sites do... who wants to read a 20 page review of Halo 3 when it waste valuable online time to frag someone? I know I don’t so I wont put you all through that either... So on to my review of Halo 3 for the Microsoft Xbox 360.

Most of the time we have Microsoft send us things to review. But I live outside of our main office in Baltimore Maryland. And here in sunny Florida I decided to do what all warm-blooded American males (between ages 18-35) did. I went and waited in line for Halo 3. After a long 2 hour wait I finally had my Special Edition tin case (complete with scratched disc and bonus disc). So far I have had no problems with my game. Anyway, enough of my babbling... I am going to do

As with the last 2 Halo titles, the game controls are tight, precise and spot-on. You can still handle 2 weapons at once. You can still throw a various array of grenades. You can still hop in a Warthog of jump into one of the many enemy vehicles. Speaking of vehicles, Halo 3 features some one favorites as well as some new goodies. One of the fast favorites is the 4-wheeler. All of your weapons are back. You can grab a flamethrower or take a heavy machine gun off it’s turret and walk around with it (in a cool Gears of War style behind the back view). And you can still melee the hell out of some poor soul if they get too close. Halo 3 has enough guns and ammo to make a Soldier of Fortune junkie blush.

Halo 3’s Single Player Mode:

I am not going to spoil anything or give anything away. You will have to go through and experience this yourself. It is by-far the beast story of the whole series though. While you play single-player mode you will once again see why Halo is one of the greatest FPS ever made. You will also see why Bungie should be highly commended for making a video game so emotional as well as giving you a constant high as you play from one second to the next. I will talk about the co-op as well, but I must warn you that I would personally play through it alone before I play it with someone else... You will have a better experience and you will not be cheated out of some of the story. (If you play with someone in co-op, you will NOT be the Master Chief... and it kind of takes away from the full feel of being the main character Master Chief). 

Halo 3’s Campaign Co-op Mode:

One of the new things about halo 3 is the online campaign mode. This allows you and 3 of your friends to play the campaign mode together. One player (the main) will the Master Chief while the other three will be . I am very impressed with this mode as well. Just imagine playing through the game with 3 of your friends from around the globe. That is pretty damn sweet. I will give you a few tips about this game mode though. I was playing with my brother in Baltimore and he was the main server. If you die, you have to make sure that the main leader is in a safe spot in order for you to re-spawn. I found sometimes that we were in a hell of trouble and I would die, he would have to retreat to a safe spot in order for me to re-spawn. Otherwise you will just be hanging in re-spawn limbo until either the leader hits safe ground or he dies. And if he dies then you have to restart back to the last checkpoint and you might have to redo everything over again. The online campaign is yet another shining point of Halo 3. Bungie went all out with this title and it really shows. I really do not recall so much online stuff crammed into one console game.   

I got your flag sucka!!!

Halo 3’s Online Mode (This is where it’s at baby):

This is the reason why you are buying Halo 3 for your Xbox 360. This is also a main reason why the Xbox 360 has the best online network on the market (yeah... take that Sony & Nintendo) and if you have never experienced Xbox Live then you truly are missing out on some awesome gaming. It takes gaming to a whole new level. Microsoft has had a few years to perfect this, but they have done it (and then some). You can basically do anything online with this game. You can edit your character, being a Master Chief, Alien, male or Female. You can change the armor (you will get more as you beat the game and open up new armor) as well as change the colors. Another thing that you can do is change your logo.

Online play has maps that consist of small maps and large maps. Each has its own unique edge over the others. Some maps are filled with vehicles while others are filled with various weapons. Maps can also be set for types of games. You can have games that just consist of snipers or sword play. This all depends on what type of games you want to play online. You can join up as teams, join up as groups of two per team or you can just go all out and have a every man for themselves death match. Each online game can be tweaked to his or her liking. Also if you are in a room getting ready to play a map, you can also choose to veto the map by votes. One thing that I truly love is the fact that everything you do is saved to Bungie’s website. You can go there and track your kills and deaths. Each broken down by every little detail like how many times you killed someone with a melee weapon or how many times you got rocked by a grenade. You can also save video and pictures and upload them to the community so everybody else can check out your skills (or lack of). These will also be featured on Bungie’s website.

As you start a room you can be a leader. This will allow you to make other players in the room a leader as well. You can also ban someone if they are getting too carried away and you just want them gone. I also like the fact that you can mute each person so you do not have to listen to any annoying babble or bad language. One thing I also found was that I was private chatting with my brother from Baltimore. And we would always end up on the same team which is really cool. While I am on the voice chat part of online play. You can edit various voice features as well. You can have it to where you can only hear people when they are close to you. I had this feature on and some poor Moe was talking the whole time. And he would give himself away on where he was. You could hear him humming and acting childish from the next room so you could just walk right in and light him up like a Christmas tree.

Now I will add that I have only two complaints about online mode so far. I am sure that you all know by now that the more you play online the more skills you gain. And your skills are made up of various groups. Right now I am a Grade 1 Sergeant. To get to a Grade 1 Sergeant you need 20 EXP points. The problem is that I have 24 EXP points... BUT I have 4 points of penalties. And I got these penalties from two things. The first is that I accidently killed my own team member while playing a launchers-only game. Some guy walked in front of me while I was trying to light someone’s ass up. And he died, so he punished me and I got booted from the game. This happened TWICE... even after I said “Sorry, my bad bro”... And the other 2 negative points were from the server locking up. So they really need to address this problem because a friend of mine also had the same problems. People can decide to be a jerk and screw your point up. Points that you are taking the time to collect online. 

The last complaint is not really a complaint at all, because I know that it will be resolved. And that is the server itself. The last 2-3 days have been plagued with down-time and server errors. At one point someone must have blown a fuse because even Xbox Live marketplace was down. I guess when Master Chief kicks ass, he takes names as well... I can see how this is though. I was online last night and there were over 600,000 Halo 3 players online. That is a lot of people  With that being said I am not sure if Microsoft and Bungie knew that it would be this crazy. As of today while I am following up this review the server is a lot smoother. 

Please edit me... I need new weapons and vehicles.

Halo 3 Forge Mode:

You have all heard about this little gem of a editor for Halo 3.  I will first say that Forge does NOT let you edit terrain or main level designs. What this feature does is allow you (and your friends as well) to go in to a pre-made level and re-do things like placements of weapons, vehicles, items, power-ups, and other things like spawn points. If you want to place a room full of your favorite weapons you can... if you want to place a Warthog on a ledge that is impossible to reach (to piss your friends off) you can do so... You basically go into each level and use your controller to move, add, delete and manipulate each aspect of the level. When you go into edit mode your character will morph into a ball. Then you can fly around the level and do what you need. Once you do something you like you can go back into your character and try out what you just changed.

Once you complete your master design you can save it and share it with your friends. This gives online play for Halo 3 endless possibilities. Just think of new maps as well. When Bungie decides to put out new levels in the Xbox Marketplace. Halo 3 is a game that offers so much and will continue to do so in years to come... It may not be a full-on level designer, but it is easy to use and pick up on. You will be editing maps within the first 5 minutes of going into Forge. It is that easy...